Poem of the Week: zakia henderson-brown

When he called home from the station begging a clean change of clothes

her nurse’s sense perked to danger but she kept cool. Not until

she got close enough to smell his adrenaline protect us stink

to see his wounds slinking down the back of his head like tribal marks

I followed him nose in a fresh torque, did she freak out. Her training

didn’t prepare her for the organs’ slow slip at seeing her new kin

seem so close slammed me on the concrete to killed, eyes widened

with war, words few and fidgety. Once home, they sat wrapped

hoodie up in the tender quiet of his safety while she calmed, reflecting:

matrimony intact. His explanation—breakneck whirlwind of suspicious,

self-defense, stakes: my life or his—was an equation she couldn’t compute

though she absorbed the faulty math, young wedding vows

bursting from the heart’s chambers, worming north, infecting her brain

with a chant: Believe him. I have to believe him. Believe him. I have to

_____________________________________________zakia henderson-brown has received fellowships and scholarships from the Cave Canem Foundation, Callaloo Journal, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Torch, Reverie, Burner Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, and the anthology Why I Am Not a Painter (Argos: 2011). She currently works as the Outreach Coordinator for The New Jim Crow at The New Press. zakia is a proud Brooklyn native and loyalist.